The United States Senate did one of their doh-see-dohs earlier this week, and the result was a verbal exchange that highlights just how polarized are lawmakers are, even within their own political parties.

As usual, there was speechifying and strangled attempts to do something that might serve to end the carnage of abortion, all of which came to naught. This week’s tawdry pro-life politician performance was all about defunding Planned Parenthood. Or, talking a great game about defunding Planned Parenthood while doing zip.

If anyone is surprised by this, please raise your hand.

Nobody?

I wrote an explanatory post for the National Catholic Register, in which I attempted to explain what happened. I also alluded, just briefly to what the real goal needs to be, which is to put meaningful language that will actually have the effect of reducing Planned Parenthood’s massive federal funding (I don’t think one piece of legislation can even begin to get all of it, btw.) that has at least the proverbial snowball’s chance of overriding a presidential veto.

It’s called tactics.

It’s not strategy, which is of a higher and more global order of political thinking. This is just bill-passing tactical thinking that any lawmaker with two brain cells knows how to do if they want to do it.

Sadly, pro life efforts have been both a strategic and tactical free zone for going on 50 years now. Pro life people have been very carefully taught to jump up and down and get all rageful, while accomplishing nothing much. I’m trying to do my little part to change that. It’s a bit like dipping out the ocean with a teaspoon, but I’m going to keep on dipping until I feel that the Lord has some other plan for me.

In the meantime, here’s the article I wrote for the Register. Read it and think, my friends. People’s lives are at stake here.

Now what does this tale of men at yell have to do with defunding Planned Parenthood? Just about everything.

Here’s the deal.

While the Senate Republicans were splitting up over Majority Leader McConnell’s action in pushing through the Export-Import Bank amendment, McConnell also deep-sixed an amendment to defund Planned Parenthood. Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul attempted to attach amendments to the bill that they say would have “defunded Planned Parenthood.” The Chair ruled the amendments out of order.

What’s the big deal about that? Doesn’t the Senate have other bills? In fact, couldn’t it pass a stand-alone bill defunding Planned Parenthood?

The big deal is that the Highway Bill is one of those must-pass pieces of legislation that everybody wants to see go into law, including the President. The federal Highway Trust Fund runs out of money on Friday. That has the road-construction industry and much of the business world in all fifty states pushing hard for this bill.

It would be impossible for most members of Congress to vote against the Highway Bill, and tough for the President to veto. I assume that the President would veto it, if it had language defunding Planned Parenthood in it, but it would give him — and Congressional Democrats—considerable heartburn.

The cherry on top was actually the much-discussed Export-Import Bank amendment. President Obama and most Democrats want that amendment. The bill, with both the Export-Import Bank amendment and the amendment defunding Planned Parenthood, would be a great bill for an override vote.

That’s why the Highway Bill was the place to put the amendment defunding Planned Parenthood and why I don’t think anyone whose first loyalty is to the babies should have been against the Export-Import Amendment. The trick here was to make an override possible.

The boys and girls in the United States Senate are doing nothing again.

However, it must be admitted that they are doing their nothing with real flair.

The reason?

It seems that most of the Ds are all in a snit over a proposed bill that would help agencies that oppose human trafficking. The bill contains a prohibition on any of the funds in the bill going to pay for abortions.

Legislation has often contained this kind of rider since the 1970s. It doesn’t prohibit anyone from getting an abortion. The debate is not about “choice.” It’s about doh-reh-me. In this case, it’s a question of whether or not to put the abortionist on the government dole by sidelining money that could be used in other ways to pay for abortions.

The Ds were all for the bill until one them read it. That’s when they discovered that it contained the language that would not allow monies to be used to pay for abortions. It’s been rock n roll, ever since. Now, all but four of the Ds (Senators Bob Casey, Joe Donnelly, Heidi Keitkamp, and Joe Manchin) are doing their level best to kill the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell retaliated against the Ds’ filibuster of the bill by saying that the Senate would not vote on President Obama’s nominee for Attorney General until the bill passed. In the meantime, proponents for the prostitution/porn industries, or as they like to call themselves, advocates for “reproductive rights,” have tossed their unselfish and humanitarian thoughts into the ring and come out against the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that voting will take place this week on the Senate Bill 178, the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015, before President Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch, will be considered.

“This needs to stop,” McConnell said of Democrats blocking the bill. “This ridiculous fight over language that they’ve already voted for frequently in the past really needs to stop so we can move forward with this very important human trafficking bill.

“This is no minor issue, and once we do that, then we’ll move on to consider the president’s nominee for Attorney General,” McConnell said.

In the last two of the five votes, Democrats voted 56-42 and 57-42 against motions to allow a vote on the bill to help human trafficking victims because they are not happy that funds meant to help women won’t be used to pay for abortions. The only Democrats to join Senate Republicans in supporting sex trafficking victims over abortion funding were Sens. Bob Casey, Pa.; Joe Donnelly, Ind.; Heidi Heitkamp, N.D.; and Joe Manchin, WV.

“They all voted for the very same language in a bill in December,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told CNN on Sunday. “This is boilerplate language that has been in the law for almost 40 years that they all voted for three months ago in another bill.”

“Mr President, when did the Democratic Party declare war on the Catholic Church?”

I want to thank Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for asking that question. As a Democratic elected official, and a life-long Democrat, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Senator also said, “If you’re litigating with nuns, you have probably done something wrong.”

Amen, brother Ted.

I’m going to put an article about this speech below. But I want to clarify something first.

The article says the S 2578 “failed” yesterday.

Wrong.

It did not “fail.” The vote was on cloture, not the bill. A vote on cloture is a vote on whether or not to stop a filibuster, or, as in this case, to allow debate on a bill. In pragmatic terms, the failure of this vote allows opponents of the legislation to mount a filibuster if they so choose (everyone assumes they will so choose) which could and probably would keep the bill from coming to a vote. It closes down debate, which stops the bill. It does not kill it.

Cloture requires 60 votes. Even though supporters of the bill fell short by 4 votes, they got a clear majority of the Senate to vote for cloture, which was, in essence a vote for the bill. Also, Majority Leader Reid set it up so that he could call another vote on cloture later.

(CNSNews.com) – Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) criticized Senate Democrats and their legislation to circumvent the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision by explaining that their bill would impose “faith fines” on groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, who refuse to subsidize abortion-inducing drugs, and asked, “Mr. President, when did the Democratic Party declare war on the Catholic Church?”

“The bill that is being voted on this floor, if it were adopted, would fine the Little Sisters of the Poor millions of dollars unless these Catholic nuns are willing to pay for abortion-producing drugs for others,” said Sen. Cruz in remarks on the Senate floor on Wednesday.

“Mr. President, when did the Democratic Party declare war on the Catholic Church?” said Cruz.

“Let me make a basic suggestion,” he continued. “If you’re litigating against nuns, you have probably done something wrong, and the Obama Administration is doing so right now. Mr. President, drop your faith fines. Mr. Majority leader, drop your faith fines. To all of my Democratic colleagues, drop your faith fines. Get back to the shared values that stitch all of us together as Americans.”

If Michael Hastings had died without mystery, in his bed from a diagnosed illness, his journalistic fame, along with widespread public interest in him, would probably have died along with him. But Michael Hastings died in a way that ensures his life, work and death will be a matter of public interest for a long time to come.

This administration, along with most members of Congress in both parties, are clearly implicated in the worst spying and civil liberties violation scandal in the history of this Republic. They have been monitoring the private conversations and emails of millions upon millions of innocent American citizens who not only have committed no crime, they are not under any sort of suspicion of committing a crime.

The legal basis for this activity is the badly misnamed “Patriot” Act. The excuse given for this is that without spying on virtually the entire American populace, the dimwits in Washington would be unable “to keep Americans safe.” According to our leaders, the only way to “keep Americans safe” is to put the entire country under surveillance.

The official reaction to leaks that let the American people know that their civil liberties are being trampled by their government is to crank up the media machine in attacks against Edward Snowden, the man who made this public. The government is going at Mr Snowden with everything they have. This isn’t about “keeping Americans safe.” It’s about protecting their own selves.

Their rage at being exposed stems from one fact. These things needed to stay secret because it would get them in trouble if it didn’t. All this blab about “security agreements” and “national security” boils down to one thing: They didn’t want the American people to know they were spying on them; not because we needed to be in the dark to “keep Americans safe” but because members of Congress and overreaching bureaucrats needed our ignorance to keep themselves safe.

The reason I’m going through this background is to explain why the untimely death of a journalist named Michael Hastings is suddenly such big news.

Michael Hastings had his finger in the spying-on-the-American-people pot, and he was evidently stirring it a bit. Given his reportorial skills, it seems possible that he might well have been jangling a few official nerves that were already raw. Just as it is imperative for the government to make an example of Edward Snowden because he let us know they were spying on us, they need, for the sake of keeping their jobs, for the story to stop stirring.

As I said, if Michael Hastings had died in his bed of a diagnosed disease, things would be different. However, he did not.

He died in a car crash into a tree that caused the car to blow up, tossing what looks in the video below like the car’s transmission about a block down the road. A few moments before the crash, he was spotted and recorded on a news video going through an intersection at high speed.

An eyewitness to the whole thing has come forward to describe what happened.

The scene is familiar to all of us. We’ve seen similar car crashes in movies and they weren’t accidents. They were assassinations. We know our government has tortured people. We also know our government lies to us and that they do it a lot.

Did Michael Hastings die in an accidental car crash caused by too much speed on a city street? Or, was he murdered?

I don’t know the answer to that question. None of the commenters who are speaking with such certainty on one side of this story or the other knows, either. They are just taking the position which will most benefit the political party they push.

What is certain is that a significant number of Americans think it’s possible that he was assassinated because of what he was writing. No matter the facts of Michael Hasting’s death, that extraordinary level of distrust in our government is a serious matter, all by itself.

The question, What do we need to “keep us safe” from all those faceless people we’ve been told “want to kill us” must be juxtaposed with the question, What do we need to keep us safe from the loss of all our freedoms.

We have lived over two hundred years in freedom. It has become almost impossible for Americans to imagine any other way to live. But the price of freedom is, and always has been, eternal vigilance. We need to remember that at least some of this eternal vigilance needs to be focused on the excesses of our own government.

I do not know what happened to Michael Hastings beyond the fact that he died in a horrible car crash. But I do know that our government is spying on all of us and that the entire Congress took part in giving shadowy agencies a blank check to do this.

What I do know is reason enough for concern.

Here are two videos I found about Michael Hastings’ death.

The first is from the LoudLabs News who spotted him speeding and followed him. The second is an interview with an eye witness to the crash. They’re the best, unbiased information I could find.

“Based on data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), CBO estimates that, each year, about 11,000 abortions take place 20 weeks or more after fertilization.”

Any honest person who has dealt with this issue can tell you that this number is bound to be on the low side. Many doctors do not report late-term abortions. One reason for this is that pro choice people fight any attempt to require reporting with wildly erroneous claims that reporting would put undue hardship on doctors and endanger “women’s health,” as well as “turn back the clock” and “send women to the back alleys again.” They usually manage to work rape and incest victims into this somewhere as well.

This is standard boiler plate stuff that they trot out during any and every discussion of pro life legislation. The incredible thing is that, no matter how many times they do it, or how completely inapplicable it may be to the legislation in question, their true believers always buy it.

So, reporting of late-term abortions is, like every other sort of needed regulation, sparse, inconsistent and compromised by expensive court cases and constant hysterics from the pro abortion lobby.

Despite this, the CDC was able to document that American doctors kill at least 11,000 babies every year whose mothers are in the 5th month or later in their pregnancies. I’ve written before about the simple fact that late-term abortion is never medically necessary. A late-term abortion inevitably puts the woman through a labor and delivery anyway. So, if there is a medical reason to stop the pregnancy to save the mother’s life, doctors should just deliver the baby and try to save both their patients.

Doctors who do late-term abortions have to very carefully kill the baby by shooting poison into its heart before before they do the procedure. If they don’t, there’s a good chance that the baby will survive the abortion and become a problem. I’m no doctor, but that sure sounds like they are aborting babies that are at least potentially viable by any definition of the word except the hatched-up political science fiction of pro abortion Supreme Court decisions.

All the arguments about the woman having a right to her own body fall apart when we consider late-term abortion. If the babycansurvive the birth, then the child’s body becomes the issue, not its mother’s.

We commit at least 11,000 of these killings every year in this country. I am against the death penalty. I have the votes and the scars to prove it. But think for a minute about the outcry if we were doing 11,000 executions each year. There would — and there should — be widespread condemnation and claims of barbarism.

The Congressional Budget Office included this paragraph in their report:

“HR 1790 would result in increased spending for Medicaid. Since a portion of Medicaid is paid for by state governments, CBO estimates that state spending on the program would increase by about $170 million over the 2014-2023 period.”

I’m not going to go off on this because I realize that it’s the job of the CBO to provide this kind of cost analysis on all pieces of legislation. They are not saying, as some people will claim, that the CBO feels this money is more important than the lives of babies. They are simply supplying the information.

The people who make the decision about what is important concerning this legislation are the duly elected members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, together with the President of the United States. They are free to either disregard this financial analysis or base their entire vote on it. That is their choice.

I will say that $170 million is not very much money over a 9-year span in Medicaid funding. At 11,000 babies killed every year of that time period, we would have 99,000 dead children. That’s almost twice the number of soldiers we lost in Viet Nam. What the report is actually telling us is that the cost is minuscule, while the number of lives lost is huge.

One thing we need to decide as a people is do we want to continue this practice of killing viable babies? I would think that even people who favor legal abortion should be ready to re-consider late-term abortions by now.

It amazes me how angry and indignant people become when they see a photo of a baby murdered in an abortion. You’d think the photos, and not the killing itself, was the problem. I think the reason for all this outrage at the sight of photos is simple: They tell a truth that people don’t want to know.

It would be better by far if we stopped those photos by stopping the killing that they record. Think how simple that would be: No more late-term abortions = No more disturbing photos of murdered late-term babies.

Gun control has become a metaphor for the way our Congress doesn’t work these days.

Proponents of the defeated gun background checks bill are looking at ways to amend it in hopes of getting the votes of push it through. Meanwhile,at least one senator, as well as the House of Representatives are pushing measures to either relax existing gun control laws or broaden situations where guns are allowed.

What I mean by that is that politics is supposed to be the art of the possible. But it appears that it’s become the art of public demagoguery in order to rally your voter base. The desire to actually accomplish anything for this country appears to be dead.

I do not see how constantly erecting straw man legislation and then voting on it does anything for the people. I know that there are times when a lawmaker will introduce legislation they don’t have much hope of passing to make a statement about deeply-held principles. I’ve done this myself. But when this becomes the only thing that Congress is doing, it starts looking like cheap demagoguery designed to deepen the culture wars and lock your sliver of the vote in place for the next election.

We call these kinds of things “hero deals,” and done in moderation, they are not only harmless, but can serve a purpose. However, the purpose of a governing body is to govern, not do endless “hero deals” for the cameras.

Surely there is something besides pumping more money into unneeded defense contracts and going on lobbyist-provided junkets that the members of Congress can agree on. Frankly, I’d like to lock all of them up in a dormitory and make them eat beans and sleep on cots until they agree to start governing for the common good and what is best for the people of the United States of America.

Given the deference they are accustomed to, I think one night of this torture should break almost all of them.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senators backing gun control are discussing ways to revise the defeated Senate background check bill to help win the votes they need to resuscitate the measure.

Among the changes they might consider are limiting the fees buyers would pay at gun shows, adding provisions dealing with the mentally ill and altering language extending the background checkrequirement to all online sales, senators said Tuesday.

Supporters fell five votes short when the Senate defeated legislation last month that would have extended required federal background checks to more buyers.

That vote, four months after the massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators at a school in Newtown, Conn., was a defeat for President Barack Obama and gun control advocates. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has promised to revisit the issue, perhaps by early summer.

While Senate Democrats hunted more votes to expand background checks, the Republican-run House took a step in the opposite direction Wednesday, voting to make the system less restrictive for some veterans.

The House Veterans Affairs Committee voted by voice to require a judge or magistrate to declare a veteran is dangerous before the name is entered in the background check system’s database of people barred from getting firearms. Currently, the Department of Veterans Affairs sends the system the names of veterans it has declared unable to manage their financial affairs — 127,000 names since 1998.

Supporters of the measure said veterans who can’t handle their money aren’t necessarily dangerous. The department opposes the measure, saying veterans in the database already have the ability to appeal.

Gun rights advocates were also taking the offensive in the Senate.

The chamber planned to vote Wednesday on a measure by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., allowing firearms on land owned by the Army Corps of Engineers if it didn’t conflict with state law. (Read the rest here.)

“This bill represented moderation and compromise,” President Obama said after his gun registry bill went down to defeat yesterday. The President appeared angry at the press conference discussing the bill. He vowed, “This effort is not over … so long as the American people don’t give up” on the effort.

What this means in terms of real politics remains to be seen. The President used political blackmail against Democratic senators to force them to support the Affordable Health Care Act. He also lied to Democratic Congressmen, saying that he would support religious and conscience exemptions to the bill. He then signed and has stood by the HHS Mandate.

I think this led to mistrust of the president in some quarters. I would guess that this played a part in why gun owners were “upset” about this bill and why they did not trust the president’s statements in support of it.

There is a large segment of the population that believes the president absolutely. Unfortunately for him, those were not the citizens whose support he needed to push this bill over. In order to pass gun control, the president needed the votes of Senators and Representatives who are from areas in the country who do not trust the president and who are also strongly in favor of the right to keep and bear arms.

Blaming the “gun control lobby” for “willful lying” seems disingenuous, considering the attitudes of the people in those states. I doubt very much that they needed to lie, willfully or otherwise to get people in those areas to let their elected officials know how they felt about these pieces of legislation.

This is a clip from President Obama’s statement on the gun control vote yesterday.

It wasn’t too bad; just some small hail, winds, driving rain and a couple of little tornadoes. But anytime we have weather, we watch Gary England. Weatherman in Oklahoma is a serious job. People trust their lives to those folks on tv and most of us feel safest when the person we’re trusting is Gary England.

Watching the weather gave my family and I a healthy dose of other news, along with watching the radar screen and storm chasers. We worked in some channel flipping to see what was happening with the fertilizer plant explosion in Waco. Somehow or other that led to a momentary pause at MSNBC in which they were deploring what they said was the “gun lobby’s” total “control” of Congress.

This particular public deploring was a reaction to the defeat of President Obama’s plan for strict background checks on would-be gun purchasers. I didn’t watch it long enough to sort it out, but I’m betting that the defeat was more difficult for the bill’s supporters to take because it was handed to them by the Democratically controlled Senate instead of the Republican-controlled House.

I mean, what’s a prez to do when his own party leaves him standing at the curb like that?Enter the “gun lobby” boogie man.

I don’t mind when critics of legislation get upset over the hammerlock special interests have over so much of our public policy in this country. In fact, I share their pain. But I am little tired of hearing about the draconian “gun lobby.”

My experience as a voting member of a legislative body for these past 17 years is that the “gun lobby” couldn’t persuade anybody to do anything if the people themselves didn’t back them up. The real “lobby” that killed this legislation is almost certainly the American people.

That’s a painful pill for gun control backers to swallow. It appears to be so tough that they will not admit the truth of it, no matter how obvious it is.

The people of this country do not, by and large, want gun control. You can slice it and dice it and poll it until your spreadsheet software crashes and it doesn’t change anything. If you pass a gun control law, people who haven’t voted since heck was a pup will register just for the purpose of voting against you.

Back in 1994, I had relatives who had never voted in their lives and who were no more political than your average goldfish get themselves registered to go vote against a Congressman who was running for the United States Senate. Why did they do this? The Congressman had voted for the Brady Bill that President Clinton passed.

That, of course, is part of the reason why polls don’t mean much with these fire-brand issues. Pollsters poll “likely voters,” which is another way of saying that they poll people who are in the habit of voting. But issues like gun control get the Saturday Night Wrestling crowd off the couch and out to the polls.

This kind of voter can not be massaged. They can not be persuaded by other issues. There is nothing you can say or do that will change their minds once they’ve set them on voting you out of office. If you represent certain parts of these United States and you do something as dumb as vote against these folks on one of their I-mean-it issues,you’d better be ready to pack up your office and go home, because your time in elected office is through.

That, and not the draconian machinations of the “gun lobby,” is why that bill bit the dust yesterday. It is also why if it hadn’t bitten the dust, the United States Senate would most likely be in Republican control come December 2014.

These aren’t tea leaves you need a sooth sayer to read for you. They’re the plain facts of what matters to a big swath of the electorate in a good many states.

Based on the news stories I’ve read, President Obama is steamed about losing his bill. He’s pledged to fight on and has accused the “gun lobbies and their allies” of “willfully lying” about the legislation. Frankly, I find the notion of a president who publicly promised conscience and religious exemptions in order to pass the Affordable Health Care Act and then turned around and signed the HHS Mandate accusing anyone of “willfully lying” to be pretty rich.

Whatever.

My only thought is that if the Senators in question represent people who don’t want gun control as much as Oklahomans don’t want it, they’d be wise to stick with what they did yesterday. The only reason to go against your constituents when they feel as strongly as people around here do about this is if you personally believe in it enough to sacrifice your career for it.

The following excerpt from a Newsmax article will give you a taste of the President’s angst over this vote.

An angry President Barack Obama denounced Senate Republicans on Wednesday for failing to pass stricter background checks on gun purchases, calling it a “pretty shameful day” for Washington.

Speaking in the Rose Garden as the families of some of the victims of the Newtown, Conn., shootings looked on, Obama vowed to press on in the fight for tougher gun laws.

“Families that know unspeakable grief summoned the courage to petition their elected leaders,” he said, standing alongside former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who left Congress after suffering a life-threatening gunshot wound to the head. “A few minutes ago a minority in the United States Senate decided it wasn’t worth it. They blocked common-sense gun reforms even when these families looked on from the gallery.”

In recent weeks, the families of some of the victims of the December shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School pressed lawmakers with stories of personal loss, as Second Amendment advocates countered that none of the proposed changes would have stopped the grisly tragedy.

Attempts to ban assault-style rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines also faced certain defeat in a series of showdown votes.

The background check measure commanded a majority of senators, 54-46, but that was well short of the 60 votes needed to advance. A total of 41 Republicans and five Democrats pulled together to scuttle the plan.

“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” Obama said, referring to fears by some that the law would allow for creation of a federal gun registry.

The president alluded to polls that peaked at 90 percent of Americans supporting expanded background checks for convicted criminals and the severely mentally ill. He said “90 percent” of Democrats supported the bill, but “90 percent” of Republicans opposed it.

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